he
first sign that the Republican Party’s 17 presidential candidates might
have trouble explaining what a conservative foreign policy should look
like — beyond simply saying that it should not look like Barack Obama’s —
emerged on May 10. That’s when the Fox News host Megyn Kelly asked Jeb
Bush a rather predictable question about the Iraq war: ‘‘Knowing what we
know now, would you have authorized the invasion?’’Bush
said yes. Shortly after that, he said that he had misheard the
question; later, that the question was hypothetical and thus unworthy of
an answer; and finally, upon further review, that he in fact would not
have authorized the invasion. The jittery about-face suggested that Bush
had spent little, if any, time digesting the lessons of the war that
defines his older brother’s presidency
The shadow that George W. Bush’s foreign policy casts over Jeb Bush’s
quest for the White House is particularly prominent. But it also looms
over the entire G.O.P. field, reminding the candidates that though
Republican voters reject what they see as Obama’s timid foreign policy,
the public has only so much appetite for bellicosity after more than a
decade spent entangled in the Middle East. At some point, even the most
conservative of voters will demand an answer to the logical corollary of
Megyn Kelly’s question: How does a president project American strength
while avoiding another Iraq?
Among the many advisers recruited to help Jeb Bush answer that question
is Richard Fontaine, the president of the Center for a New American
Security, a policy group based in Washington. Fontaine was a senior
foreign-policy adviser for Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential
campaign, where he first learned that winning over voters was a
radically different task from those he navigated during his career in
the Bush administration. ‘‘Diplomacy is about minimizing differences,’’
he told me. ‘‘ ‘Pol Pot and the Pope — surely there’s something they can
agree on.’ A political campaign is exactly the opposite. It’s about
taking a minor difference and blowing it up into
something transcendent.’’
Watching
Jeb Bush flub the Iraq question confirmed a theory about that war and
its unheeded lessons that Fontaine had been nurturing for several
months. In February, he co-wrote an essay in Politico Magazine arguing
that Congress should not authorize Obama to use military force against
ISIS until it had done the kind of due diligence that Congress utterly
failed to do before authorizing Bush to invade Iraq in 2002. In response
to the essay, Fontaine said, many of his peers acknowledged to him
‘‘that there actually hasn’t been a lot of thinking on this from the
entire foreign-policy establishment other than the knee-jerk ‘Well,
we’re never gonna do that again.’ ’’
Fontaine,
who is 40, Clark Kentish in appearance and wryly self-deprecating in
conversation, has been doing quite a bit of thinking on the matter of
Iraq. He worked in the State Department as well as the National Security
Council during the first year of the Iraq war before signing on as
McCain’s foreign-policy aide in 2004. Over the next five years, he and
McCain traveled to Iraq 10 times. His boss had been one of the loudest
advocates of toppling Saddam Hussein and then one of the most candidly
chagrined observers when the war effort began to crumble before his
eyes. ‘‘We’d been running this experiment from 2003 to the end of 2006
of trying to make political changes in Iraq and hoping this would
positively influence the security,’’ Fontaine recalled. ‘‘It only got
worse and worse. Things got to the point where there was no political or
economic activity in the country, because the violence was so bad.’’
The
troop surge in 2007 succeeded in stabilizing the country. By then,
however, Americans were weary of military aggression. In 2008, they
elected president a one-term U.S. senator who had consistently opposed
the war in Iraq and vowed to end it so he could devote most of his
attention to a foundering economy. Four years later, the electorate
awarded Obama a second term, with the same priorities in mind. Exit
polls showed that 60 percent of voters regarded the economy as the
predominant issue in 2012, while a mere 4 percent cited foreign affairs
as their chief voting issue.
Three
years later, this has changed — especially for Republican voters, who,
according to several polls, now say national security rivals the economy
as a foremost concern. Several factors explain this. While the economy
has continued to improve, the Obama administration has watched with
seeming helplessness as ISIS dominates swaths of Iraq and Syria while
beheading American hostages; as Iran threatens to make good on its
nuclear ambitions unless the United States agrees to lift sanctions; as
Vladimir Putin reasserts Russian primacy by invading the Crimean
Peninsula; and as China spreads its influence across Asia and Africa.
These and other developments have revived concerns that the United
States has become dangerously weaker under a Democratic president, one
whose first secretary of state happens to be the apparent favorite for
that party’s presidential nomination.
The
swaggering rhetoric of Donald Trump, the current Republican
front-runner, seems deftly calibrated to reflect the mood of a G.O.P.
base spoiling for fights abroad. According to a Quinnipiac University
poll in July, 72 percent of registered Iowa Republican voters (where the
first contest for presidential delegates will be held early next year)
favor sending American ground troops into Syria and Iraq to fight ISIS.
In August, Quinnipiac found that 86 percent of all Republicans opposed
the Iran nuclear deal.
Fontaine
is among the conservative foreign-policy thinkers who argue that the
Obama administration has overlearned Iraq’s lessons. ‘‘Their core belief
was ‘We’re here to wind these wars down, and the risks in doing so are
manageable,’ ’’ he said. ‘‘The instinct was to limit our investment,
whether diplomatically or in terms of blood and treasure. That’s caused a
willful disregard for the realities at hand. You hear it all the time:
‘This is the Iraqis’ fight,’ or ‘The Syrians should be fighting.’ Yes,
they should. But if they’re not, then we have a national interest, and
we should be doing something.’’
Eventually,
each G.O.P. candidate will be called upon to define exactly what that
‘‘something’’ is and determine whether Americans have an appetite for
it. To that end, for the next 14 months, it will fall to advisers like
Fontaine to help the candidates craft a post-Bush/post-Obama
foreign-policy vision, one that simultaneously projects more muscle than
Obama and less reckless use of muscle than Bush. The tricky part, as
their advisers — avowed hawks whose careers were shaped by Iraq — know
all too well, will be to demonstrate that an aggressive foreign policy
can somehow avoid becoming a reckless one.
In the weeks and
months following the announcement of a presidential candidacy, the
‘‘invisible primary’’ ensues: a wooing and hoarding of assorted campaign
specialists and policy experts to convince the donor community that the
candidate in question is for real and lacks only money to make the
whole operation hum. During this season, men and women who have lived
lives of bookish reserve and who are thoroughly unknown to the general
public become, for a brief time, objects of considerable desire.
As
a national-security expert who worked with politicians but had no
political agenda of his own, Fontaine received multiple inquiries. He
declined to work with the campaigns of Scott Walker and Marco Rubio but
agreed to join the Bush foreign-policy team after Bill Simon, a former
Wal-Mart chief executive and now the Bush campaign’s policy-team
recruiter, asked him to come aboard as an informal outside adviser.
Simon had heard about Fontaine through other recruits, including the
former World Bank president Robert Zoellick, who had been a consultant
for several campaigns before Bush prevailed upon him to pledge his
fidelity.
Zoellick
and Fontaine belong to a nomadic tribe of worldly Republican
technocrats who migrate from academia to government to nonprofit policy
centers to the private sector. Nearly all are hawks who abhor not only
Obama’s posture of caution but also the old-style, consensus-building
internationalism espoused by officials who served in the first Bush
administration, like Richard Burt and Lorne Craner, who are now on Rand
Paul’s foreign-policy team. Among the conservative intelligentsia, a few
— Meghan O’Sullivan, Kristen Silverberg and Elbridge Colby — are
comparatively moderate alumni of the second Bush administration who now
advise his brother’s campaign. Others have made their names on the Hill
as forceful interventionists: Robert S. Karem, who advised the House
majority leaders Eric Cantor and Kevin McCarthy before directing Jeb
Bush’s foreign-policy team; Jamie Fly, formerly Rubio’s aide in the
Senate and now in his campaign; and Michael Gallagher, a former Senate
Foreign Relations Committee staff member who now runs Scott Walker’s
foreign-policy shop. In addition, advisers like Vance Serchuk, who was
Senator Joe Lieberman’s foreign-policy aide and now works in a
geopolitical-strategy unit for the global investment firm KKR, and
Christian Brose, the staff director of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, are not committed to a particular campaign but are routinely
called by campaign aides for their thoughts on foreign policy. What most
of them have in common is that they are under 45 and have been
influenced far more by the fall of the twin towers than by the collapse
of the Berlin Wall.
The
candidates are pulled toward experience as well, creating an odd
dissonance within these teams as they are taking shape. For example, Jeb
Bush’s team includes not just a new generation of foreign-policy
thinkers but also Paul Wolfowitz, a prominent 71-year-old
neoconservative. Wolfowitz’s long career in the national-security arena
reached both its peak and its nadir when he served as George W. Bush’s
deputy secretary of defense and pushed aggressively for the invasion of
Iraq just after 9/11, assuring skeptics that the Iraqis would ‘‘welcome
us as liberators’’ and that the indigenous oil revenues would largely
finance the country’s reconstruction. In no small measure because of
Wolfowitz’s erroneous predictions, the neocon brand came to be ridiculed
during the early stages of the Iraq war, only to be vindicated somewhat
by the triumph of the 2007 troop surge, which quelled Sunni violence
and stabilized the Shia-dominated government.
Continue reading the main story
Throughout
that period, not every hawk self-identified as a neocon, including
Fontaine, who told me, ‘‘Where I come down on this is I believe in the
promotion of human rights and democracy, but there are times when you
have to have pragmatic relationships with autocracies.’’ And today there
are fewer still who call themselves neocons, the moniker being
generally viewed as an epithet. Its basic principles, however — among
them, a belief in the aggressive promotion of American values throughout
the world, an unapologetic distrust of international institutions and
the conviction that a more democratic world is a less belligerent one —
are abiding specters in conservative foreign-policy thought.
The
persistence of a chesty, exceptionalist view of America’s place on the
world stage is, of course, also abetted by today’s nuance-free zone of
political dialogue. ‘‘The discourse in Washington just becomes like a
self-licking ice cream cone of maximalist foreign policy,’’ Obama’s
deputy national-security adviser, Ben Rhodes, told me. ‘‘That’s what
gets you on television. That’s what gets your think-tank paper read.’’
But
conservative voters far from the Beltway are also clamoring for a
return to a more muscular foreign policy, and there is almost certainly
one major reason for this: It would be very different from the current
foreign policy. Obama’s worldview, seven years into his presidency, is
aptly reflected by something else that Rhodes said to me: ‘‘There’s such
an extreme vanity that everything happening in the world is an
extension of our agency. There are just forces happening. They’re
happening all across the Middle East. And our narrative of what’s
supposed to happen in these places has never been right, because they’re
at different stages of development and have different politics. And
where we succeed in foreign policy is when we patiently and methodically
incentivize better behavior, and you give space for that to occur. It’s
very hard to completely impose a system on a country. The last time it
worked was in postwar Japan.’’
When I shared
Rhodes’s sentiment with Jim Talent, one of Scott Walker’s
foreign-policy advisers, he winced before replying: ‘‘Obama doesn’t
accept as a basic principle that we should lead in the forefront of
events, particularly in the Middle East. I’m not sure the president
believes the U.S. can do that. And there I disagree. We can’t control
the world. No way. But we do have influence. If you want to call me a
neocon for that, go ahead.’’
Talent,
a placid-faced 58-year-old Midwesterner, was a congressman from St.
Louis when he won a special election to the U.S. Senate in 2002 with
heavy backing from President Bush, whose desire for congressional
authorization to invade Iraq Talent heartily endorsed. By 2006, when
Talent was up for re-election, the war had taken a disastrous turn.
Talent nonetheless insisted that ‘‘the mission is going well’’ and
further declared that the invasion was justified even when no weapons of
mass destruction were found. He lost to Claire McCaskill and has been
out of electoral politics ever since.
A
second career soon awaited him — that of national-security guru. While
serving on congressionally established advisory commissions, Talent also
became a national-security adviser to Mitt Romney’s campaigns in 2008
and 2012. It was commonly speculated that a President Romney would tap
Talent to be his secretary of defense. Today the same can be said for
Talent under a Walker presidency.
If
Bush, the candidate being advised by Richard Fontaine, is challenged by
the need to distinguish his foreign-policy vision from that of his
brother, Talent’s candidate — a Wisconsin governor with no experience on
international issues — is obligated to come up with a vision from
scratch. Talent asserts that Walker, the man who dismantled Wisconsin’s
public-employee unions, will face down enemies abroad with equal
fortitude. On Aug. 28 at the Citadel, Walker laid out his own
foreign-policy approach, emphasizing the need for strong executive
leadership, much as Rubio’s foreign-policy address in May made the case
that America must ‘‘lead with strength and principle,’’ and Jeb Bush’s
speech in August cited America’s need to ‘‘lead again’’ in the Middle
East — all of them stopping short of Lindsey Graham’s pledge to send
10,000 troops to Iraq.
To
assist in constructing Walker’s foreign policy, Talent says that he is
urging the candidate to articulate what he also ‘‘hammered on Mitt’’ to
put forward: an encompassing vision with strategic clarity that the
public, Congress, allies and enemies can all understand. ‘‘The real
lesson of Iraq,’’ he said, ‘‘is that you always have to ask, ‘O.K., what
are we trying to achieve and how does it fit into our broader
goals?’ ’’ He continued, ‘‘We can’t spend the next term with everybody
pointing fingers about what went wrong with Iraq.’’
Arguably, however, ‘‘what went wrong with Iraq’’ was that there was
a strategically clear vision in play. It was called the Bush Doctrine, a
post-9/11 articulation of neoconservatism. Among its central tenets, as
enunciated frequently by Bush himself, was the determination to ‘‘take
the fight to the enemy overseas before they can attack us again here at
home.’’ Walker has employed nearly identical rhetoric in describing how
he would fight ISIS: ‘‘We need a leader who will look the American
people in the eye and say, ‘We will do whatever it takes — whatever it
takes — to make sure that radical Islamist terrorism does not wash up on
American soil.’ I’d rather take the fight to them.’’
I
asked Michael Gallagher, the coordinator of Walker’s foreign-policy
team, what distinguished his own philosophy from that of the
neoconservatives. He replied that such distinctions weren’t meaningful,
given that all Republicans favored a robust alternative to Obama’s
seeming reluctance to lead: ‘‘I think lost in this debate between
isolationism and neoconservatism is the fact that there is a striking
amount of consensus within the party.’’ When I asked if there was
anything in his experience — Gallagher was a Marine captain deployed to
Anbar Province in late 2007 — that would make him question the
neoconservative worldview, he paused at great length before finally
saying, ‘‘I don’t have anything to offer on that.’’
Republicans
like Walker have criticized Obama’s incursion into Libya on the front
end (‘‘leading from behind’’) as well as the back end (failing to
prevent the free-for-all of warring militias that currently prevails
there). But they have been far more reticent in explaining how they
would have responded to the popular uprising against Qaddafi or to the
Arab Spring in general. When I asked Talent, he thought for a moment
before replying. ‘‘Well, I’ll tell you as Jim Talent — I don’t think
Governor Walker has opined on this topic yet,’’ he said. ‘‘The question
of when purely humanitarian goals, assuming there is such a thing,
should be an object of American policy is one that I think reasonable
people can really debate over.’’
Prodded
to specify what he would have advised the president to do in Libya,
Talent mentioned ‘‘two reasonable options.’’ One would have been to
limit American activity to humanitarian aid, on the grounds that the
circumstances did not significantly affect our national interests. The
other recourse would have been to drive Qaddafi out of power but then
‘‘continue to be involved post-conflict, to help ensure that the
government that emerges is a partner.’’ In Talent’s view, ‘‘Either of
those options would have been better than overthrowing him and seeing
what happens next. Now we have a much worse humanitarian disaster and
elements on the ground that are enemies of America.’’ Of course, as
Talent conceded, he did not warn against such scenarios in real time,
before the Libya bombing, just as many Republicans did not forecast the
complications that would arise from invading Iraq in 2003.
In
May, Walker offered a textbook case of how a Republican presidential
candidate can reframe the failures of the Iraq war: Skip past the first
four years of chaotic bloodshed and focus instead on President Bush’s
decision in 2007 to send another 20,000 troops into Iraq. Bush, Walker
said, deserved ‘‘enormous credit for ordering the surge, a courageous
move that worked,’’ and then lamented that Obama ‘‘threw away the gains
of the surge,’’ with brutal consequences. And in his foreign-policy
address last month, Jeb Bush also glossed over the questionable decision
to invade Iraq and instead lavished praise on the surge as the
‘‘turning point we had all been waiting for,’’ one that was then
squandered by Obama with a ‘‘premature withdrawal’’ of troops that
constituted ‘‘the fatal error, creating the void that ISIS moved in to
fill, and that Iran has exploited to the full as well.’’
The only Republican
candidate who has expressed disagreement with this point of view is
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Regarding the surge, Paul has offered
measured praise: ‘‘It was a military tactic and it worked.’’ But he has
flatly stated that ‘‘invading Iraq was a mistake.’’ Paul’s blunt
assessment of the Iraq war has won him some peculiar bedfellows — among
them, Elise Jordan, who served in Bush’s National Security Council’s
communications team in Washington and Afghanistan and also traveled to
Iraq while serving as a speechwriter for Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice. She is now on the foreign-policy team of Paul, the least
interventionist candidate in the Republican field. Jordan, who is 33,
has often been asked variations of: ‘‘Wait. You work for Rand Paul? And
you were in Iraq?’’ To which her reply has been: ‘‘Yes. Exactly.’’
As
a Bush staff member, Jordan watched Iraq degenerate into turmoil —
observing at close hand, she said, ‘‘a really clear disconnect between
what we were telling ourselves and what was happening on the ground.’’
The surge revived her hopes in America’s ability to quell sectarian
violence by military means. But after leaving the White House, she
worked as a freelance journalist, visiting Afghanistan in 2010 to embed
with U.S. troops for an article about the military’s counterinsurgency
efforts against the Taliban. This was during a troop surge modeled after
the maneuver in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, the tactic proved
ineffectual. Jordan began to question the value of the war there and,
more broadly, the neoconservative notion that America can impose its
values on other nations. ‘‘While I still believe that all people deserve
freedom, it’s paternalistic to think we can bring it to them,’’ she
told me.
She met Paul in March 2013 — days after his nearly 13-hour filibuster
relating to Obama’s drone program, and three months before her husband,
the acclaimed Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, was killed in
an automobile accident. Echoing what Paul’s other advisers would tell
me, Jordan was struck by how thoughtful and well read he seemed, belying
the caricature of him as an isolationist. Since signing on, she has
been surprised by the vigor with which the other candidates,
particularly Marco Rubio, Rick Perry and Lindsey Graham, have attacked
his foreign-policy views. ‘‘The fact that so many are threatened by him
is a sign of how the Republican Party can’t deal with some deviations
from conventional thought,’’ she said.
Those
attacks have dwindled of late, no doubt because Paul has struggled to
raise money, mount a disciplined campaign and break through the primal
roar of the Trump movement. Still, it remains the case that Paul is the
only candidate committed to designing a post-neocon Republican foreign
policy. As another of his advisers, the Carnegie Mellon University
international-relations professor Kiron Skinner, says, ‘‘He’s trying to
provide a corrective to both the Bush and Obama administrations, in
which we use American military power responsibly and when there’s a
clear understanding of what’s needed.’’
That
feat has been difficult for Paul to pull off as he attempts to placate
both the libertarian followers of his father, Ron Paul, and the
conservative G.O.P. base. He has hedged on his commitment to eliminate
all foreign aid, gone out of his way to show his support for Israel and
adopted more confrontational language toward Syria and Iran. Paul has
also said that if he were president, he would ‘‘seek congressional
authorization to destroy ISIS militarily.’’ Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper
to clarify what this would entail, he said that he meant ‘‘Arab boots on
the ground.’’ The candidate has yet to elaborate on how he would be the
first American president to inspire an Arab army to ‘‘destroy’’ an
Islamist extremist group.
Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
Of
course, presidential campaigns don’t tend to be incubators of complex
foreign policy. Throughout the 2008 campaign cycle, Obama the candidate
was fond of declaring on the stump that Al Qaeda grew stronger because
the Iraq war had caused the Bush administration to ‘‘take our eye off
the ball’’ instead of ‘‘refocusing our attention on the war that can be
won in Afghanistan.’’ Today the president is at pains to explain why
this refocusing has not come close to fulfilling his campaign
declarations.
Today’s foreign-policy
thinkers must also test their idealistic notions of American
possibility on a geopolitical landscape littered with the wreckage of
ideals past. As Richard Fontaine explained to me: ‘‘In Iraq, we toppled
the government and did an occupation and everything went to hell. In
Libya, we toppled the government and didn’t do an occupation and
everything went to hell. In Syria, we didn’t topple the government and
didn’t do an occupation and everything went to hell. So, broadly, this
is the Middle East. Things go to hell. And we’ve got to make our way
through that fact to protect our national interests, on the back of a
war-weary public that doesn’t want to invest our treasure in this.’’
That
tension between steadfast principles and hard realities, both at home
and abroad, was on display when some of America’s leading foreign-policy
thinkers gathered for a retreat hosted by the Aspen Institute, a
nonpartisan education and policy organization, in August. The
conference’s main event was an hourlong debate about ISIS.
Each debate team featured two national-security officials from the Bush
and Obama administrations. One team, Philip Zelikow, a former counselor
to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Michèle Flournoy, Obama’s
former defense undersecretary of defense for policy, argued that ISIS
should be defeated, including through military means. The other team,
Dov Zakheim, Bush’s former Defense Department comptroller and
foreign-policy adviser, and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Obama’s director of
policy planning for the State Department, argued that it should be
contained until it collapsed under the weight of its own failed
ideology, as occurred with the Soviet Union. Among the 200 spectators
were the retired general David Petraeus, the former secretary of state
Madeleine Albright and Jeb Bush’s outside adviser, Richard Fontaine.
The
debate was spirited and replete with unintended ironies. There was
Flournoy, the former Obama official, arguing the traditional neocon
position that the only way to give the lie to ISIS’s ideology was to
‘‘take territory away from ISIS.’’ And there was Zakheim, the former
Bush official, sounding decidedly noninterventionist: ‘‘The issue is,
can you and are you willing to send in hundreds of thousands of troops?
Do you think this country wants to do that? Do you think we even want to
spend money to do that?’’
Zakheim’s
realpolitik warning hit the audience like a bucket of cold water. Even
the nation’s most intellectually rigorous foreign-policy thinkers
seemed struck by the challenge of convincing the American public that
war against ISIS would not entail a horrific reprise of the Iraq war.
Surveyed before the debate began, 52 percent of attendees believed that
ISIS should be destroyed, with 27 percent saying it should be contained
and another 21 percent being undecided. After the debate, the audience
underwent a reversal: 59 percent were now convinced that the proper
course of action was to contain ISIS rather than to pour blood and
treasure into an attempt to destroy it.
But
Fontaine was not won over. ‘‘Their argument — don’t roll them back,
hold them in place and they’ll defeat themselves through their internal
contradictions — has never happened to a terrorist group,’’ he said
later. ‘‘And I think we can roll them back. We’ve already shrunk their
territory by a third. Containment, if you stop there, is a recipe for
endless bloodshed.’’ That was his distinctly minority, stubbornly
hawkish opinion. And if Fontaine had his way, it would soon become Jeb
Bush’s as well.
